“Caught someplace between Jerry Reed and Gram Parsons, Famous Lunch is a world ridden hard, put away wet and full of fragility, boundless, unpredictable love and one-liners that’ll make you cry, laugh and puke—in that order.” — Paste
“Acker’s dual strengths are his songs’ easy, approachable pacing and his everyday poetic one-liners. To the former, his jangly, acoustic-driven tunes are as comfortable as well-worn jeans that have never seen a spin cycle. To the latter, lines…build vivid scenes at an impressively low word count.” — No Depression
ACTRESE has just released her new single, "Nowhere". Written, composed, and produced entirely by ACTRESE, "Nowhere" is a bilingual, guitar driven litany about failed attempts, missed chances and never ending obstacles standing in the way of you and your dreams - ‘I hate it gets me nowhere / When I try anything at all’ ACTRESE’s haunting vocals spell out as the song opens with a piercing electric guitar and buzzy synth which only intensify as we go on.
"As we wrote and recorded the album, baseball imagery and themes naturally found their way into the songs, so Scott suggested 'The Baseball Diaries,' and really encouraged me to lean into it. I like that it subtly evokes 'The Basketball Diaries' in the same way Liz Phair's 'Exile in Guyville' nodded to 'Exile on Main St.'—not as a direct imitation, but as a reference point that helps frame a deeply personal body of work.
“Britain's most incisive songwriter." – THE GUARDIAN
”The thinking person's indie pop legend, and unaccredited national treasure.” – STEWART LEE (THE SUNDAY TIMES)
“The former Hefner frontman follows a set of Oulipian constraints to produce a set of typically affecting meditations of love, life and mortality.” – THE QUIETUS
"Darren Hayman has always been something of a niche and cult figure, but music as good and as important as this should be heard by far more than a cult audience.” –DIY
“Musically, it’s melodic electropop willfully reluctant to be tied to any reference points. Maybe Marianne Faithfull’s ‘Ballad Of Lucy Jordan’, for its quietly bubbling synths and domestic angst? Or a more humane Momus?” – ELECTRONIC SOUND
“There is darkness, confusion and regret but there is also a horse to drive away on,”the band’s singer Daniel Bluer explains. “It might be a mistake but it is certainly exhilarating in the moment.”
“You Move is about savoring the unexpected fruits that reveal themselves amid times of uprootedness. It is a song about putting trust in the glimmer of new love, and carefully sowing the seeds for it to sustain. Both thematically and sonically, it’s about searching, surrendering and allowing yourself to relish. My hope is that “You Move” invites people into the world of my soon-to-be-finished sophomore album – a world that encompasses a full-swing of emotionality, and lets loss and pleasure dance together. I’m so excited to share the song and video ahead of my first-ever UK/EU shows.” – Avery Friedman (she/her)
“Scarily accomplished…Inhabits a complex emotional realm where nervousness can coexist with (and inform) ideas of sexiness, sadness, tenderness.” – KLOF MAG
“Her full-length debut, New Thing, is a work of raw singer/songwriter confessionalism, evoking the knotted melodies, homespun arrangements, and searing edges of musicians like Squirrel Flower, Babehoven, or Adrienne Lenker.“ – UNDER THE RADAR MAGAZINE
“Plenty of stakes present themselves in debut efforts, but Friedman stands before audiences fearless – 5/5.” – NEW NOISE MAGAZINE
“There's a particular way light particles interact that Montreal-based folk singer-songwriter Edwin Raphael captures in his thoughtfully expansive, globe-trotting soundscapes. "Mosaic in the Sun" and "A Sunbeam Lent to Us Briefly," arrive with the breathless wonder of language's inability to articulate the emotional heft of a momentary prism falling upon the scene just so.” - Exclaim!, Most Anticipated Albums of 2026
“...it’s indie folk with enough orchestral weight to fill a room. These are songs built for distance and open windows.” - Montreal Rocks
“Buzzing drones meet uplifting guitar melodies as Edwin Raphael’s imaginative narrative unravels on First Time on Earth. The ebbs and flows from bursts of energy to pulled-back introspective moments. Life brings with it more questions than answers, but it’s seeking beauty in the mundane, in the wonder of small miracles, that we find meaning." CBC Music, 'Songs You Need To Hear’
Will Schwartz spent more than a decade writing fiction before The Male Patternbrought him back to music. On If It Be Your Will, we talk about I Was Shot in the Heart! — a darkly funny, deeply human concept album about a bitter suburban dad who sees himself as the hero of his own tragedy. Will talks about growing up with music and writing, fatherhood, rediscovering the joy of making things simply because you want to, and why hiding behind a fictional character can sometimes reveal more truth than writing about yourself.
"I am absolutely head over heels in love with this record. It absolutely made my day. The lyrics, the narrative structure: it’s some Randy Newman-level shit. Just brilliant stuff all around." - Chris Ingalls (PopMatters)
“The Male Pattern (aka Will Schwartz) explores the darker side of straight white male consciousness in his upcoming concept album I Was Shot in the Heart! (out September 25.) Schwartz's ice-cold character sketch on "I'm a Solider" exposes the self-pitying paranoia behind the conservative mind, all while skewering country music tropes.” – Rainbow Rodeo
"We’re not certain a satirical concept album described as “Springsteen meets Ween” was on our bingo card of releases in 2026, but sometimes you only realise you’ve been waiting for something when it finally arrives...The undeniable irony and playfulness do nothing to undermine the heartbreaking loneliness running through its heart. An anthem of America in 2026, where vapidity, ridiculousness and mean-spirited self-interest feel like symptoms of some dark, cursed pathology lurking beneath the surface."
Secret To Spare officially came together across spare days and weekends across 2025, in the gaps between Jawdropped’s increasingly busy tour schedule, including runs with their labelmates Greg Freeman and Rocket, and juggling various day jobs. “The EP were songs that pretty much already existed,” Kyra Morling explains. “This record was the first time where we were building songs together in a room.” Together, the foursome pooled their simpatico inspirations - the Lemonheads’ beautifully messy country-pop sprawl, Paul Westerburg’s wizened raucousness, and the crunchy hooks of ‘90s greats like Teenage Fanclub and Dinosaur Jr. - into the ten gems that make up this record.
Like Hefner before them, The French became popular with John Peel, and they recorded their first session for him in 2003, as well as having two songs appear in that year’s Festive Fifty. This EP of reimagined childhood television themes was originally put together as an experimental Maida Vale session for Peel. Airing on BBC Radio 1 in July 2004, just a few months before the legendary DJ’s passing, this oddity would become Hayman’s final Peel session.
The French issued just one album (‘Local Information’), which received a five-star review in The Guardian, was called a “Buried Treasure” by Electronic Sound Magazine as well as a “Hidden Gem” by Mojo Magazine, in addition to one of its songs (“The Wu Tang Clan”) finding new life when covered by Allo Darlin’. The album also triggered a lengthy legal issue with the label, Too Pure, and in Hayman's words, “torpedoed” his career, but nonetheless remains one of his favourites of his career.
Stornoway make the kind of indie music that refuses to sit still: folk one minute, orchestral, wild and wonderfully odd the next. After splitting, regrouping and finding their way back to each other, the Oxford band return with *Beyonder* — a record packed with birds, oceans, memory and big questions. Oli Steadman and Brian Briggs talk beginnings, breakups, folk songs, conservation, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and why, after all these years, Stornoway still sound gloriously like Stornoway.
"I’m proud of that. It has some reversed pedal steel on it, and there’s this one vocal sample at the end from a time some friends were singing in a tunnel in the woods - the same tunnel is featured on the cover of the album, which feels significant in this secret little way," they continue. "The song speaks to the feeling of being stuck on a past relationship, revisiting things over and over and looking for glimmers of hope that it could be real again. This is a big theme in the album - being stuck on the past - although each song has its own subtle emotional valence to that experience.” thelineofbestfit
“The band captures a swampy, heat-drenched collective chemistry, managing to sound shaggy and loose while careening along the track’s winding grooves.” - Under the Radar
“An intimacy underlined by a certain sense of disbelief” - Various Small Flames
“... An introspective folk record with balls, sort of like if Pedro the Lion pushed ‘Control’ even further, or maybe like Good Looks, more recently.” - Austin Town Hall
“blown-out folksy rock" - Post Trash
"Austin Wilson might be Providence based, but he hasn’t forgotten his roots in Houma, Louisiana and the people he grew up alongside, the people he left behind.” - Americana UK
So Faint is the collaborative project of Lyn Heinemann and Hannah Georgas, born from a chance encounter in a Vancouver recording studio and shaped by a decade-long friendship. After years on separate paths, with Lyn stepping away from bands, but still writing music for herself and Hannah building an acclaimed international music career that has recently seen her join Broken Social Scene for their latest LP Remember The Humans, the two reunited in 2023 to create the music they’d been quietly missing.
“'Landlord”'was in a big pile of songs I started in 2023," Glaser says of the track. "I had just turned 29 and was essentially starting over. Most painful, beautiful, necessary year of my life. I was bopping around between friend’s guest rooms and my parent’s basement in St. Louis. Writing is genuinely all I wanted to do. This was one of the first that came out that really excited me… I started playing the little arpeggiated synth line & just let it loop for hours.. slowly wrote words over it and added a clunky guitar part. It was the first one off “The Lodge In Miller County” that I brought to other people. I made a demo with Owen Lewis & Jamie Dick in Nashville.. Hearing real drums kind of turned the “I’m making these into album” switch on. It also gave me maybe the most severe case of demo-itis I’ve ever had?? There are probably 14 different versions of this song."
Memphis-based artist Carl Krausnick continues to carve out a distinct lane for himself as a solo artist with "Important Questions," a track that opens on quiet reflection and closes in a swell of distortion. The song begins with a lean, twangy guitar figure and a vocal that feels almost conversational, then gradually stacks layer upon layer until it arrives at a genuinely rousing finish, the kind of slow-burn build that rewards patience.
After a decade since their last record, Attic Abasement returns with their fourth studio album, Moonlight Passes On, out August 14, 2026 via Father/Daughter Records. The Rochester, NY recording project, led by singer/songwriter Mike Rheinheimer and joined by a rotating cast of local musicians, has existed as an outlet to work through Rheinheimer’s doubt and low-grade existential anxiety. While 2016’s Dream News was captured in a live, full band setting, Moonlight Passes On emerged from years of introspection; a practice of solitude. “I had a handful of songs sitting on the shelf for years but had just been inspired over the course of a few nights in my basement in early 2023,” explains Rheinheimer.
Since emerging from Vermont's DIY underground in the mid-2000s, Lincoln Halloran has built a body of work distinguished by its startling intimacy. Across a string of beloved records, his songs have occupied a rare space, full of details drawn from lived experience and transformed into something larger. His writing has always been less concerned with resolution than observation: half-remembered encounters and emotional afterimages that remain long after a moment has passed. "In Hell" embodies that gift. Written as an attempt to create a more overtly pop-minded, jangle-driven song, the track glides forward on bright guitar lines and an understated melodic ease.
That night outside the Dolphin
I was having so much trouble walking
light skipped my legs
they went too soon
I loved watching you laughing
outside, holding your friend crying
cuz your moving home
are you still?
How your eyes still look like heaven
for how long they have been open
and i saw you walk in
you split the room
are you still in hell?
or are you still?
